A whole other story

Can technology be autonomous? Does it lead a life of its own and operate independently of human guidance? From the French theologian Jacques Ellul to the Unabomber, this used to be widely accepted. Today, however, most historians and sociologists of technology dismiss it as naive and inaccurate. Yet modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.

And Forbes — one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions — now employs a company called Narrative Science to generate automatically online articles about what to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”

Don’t miss the irony: automated platforms are now “writing” news reports about companies that make their money from automated trading. These reports are eventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spot even more lucrative deals. This is journalism done by robots and for robots. The only upside is that humans get to keep all the cash.

Narrative Science is one of several companies developing automated journalism software. These start-ups work primarily in niche fields — sports, finance, real estate — in which news stories follow the same pattern and revolve around statistics. Now they are entering the political reporting arena. A new service from Narrative Service generates articles about how the US electoral race is reflected in social media, what issues and candidates are most and least discussed in a state or region, and similar topics. It can even incorporate quotes from the most popular and interesting tweets into the article. Nothing covers Twitter better than the robots. (...)

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation and Slate (slate.com), where it was first published